Past NIMBioS Postdoctoral Fellow

Erol Akçay

Dates: August 2009 – July 2011

Project Title:Coordination and negotiation in animal social behavior and interspecific mutualisms

As a NIMBioS postdoctoral fellow,
Erol Akçay (Ph.D. Biology, Stanford University, 2008)
primarily focused on the roles of cooperation and conflict in two different but related systems: social behavior in animals and the evolution of mutually beneficial interactions between species. The general question Akçay focused on was how cooperation within and between species can be maintained in the face of conflicts of interests. In particular, Akçay studied the effects of proximate mechanisms of interaction, such as behavioral motivations and physiological mechanisms, on the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation. Upon completing his fellowship at NIMBioS, Dr. Akçay was a postdoctoral fellowship at the Univ. of California, Berkeley in the lab of
Ellen Simms and later accepted a position as an associate research scholar at Princeton University.
He is now an assistant professor of biology at the Univ. of Pennsylvania.

Bewick SA, Chisholm RA, Akcay E, Godsoe W. October 2011. Tropical biodiversity: New models for an old problem. Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, Modern Mathematics Workshop, San Jose, CA.

Concurrent with Akçay's postdoctoral appointment, Akçay was Co-PI for the NIMBioS Working Group:
Function and Evolution. Akçay also participated in the NIMBioS Working Group:
Coalitions and Alliances and the NIMBioS Investigative Workshop: New Soil Black Box Strategies.
In addition, Akçay hosted a number of collaborative short-term visitors. Akçay also co-organized a workshop of Turkish ecologists and evolutionary biologists, which was held in Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in December 2009.

Akçay gave a research talk at California State University, San Marcos, a minority-serving institution, and a public seminar about his research in Istanbul, Turkey. Akçay also co-wrote and obtained funding for a small-scale public outreach grant from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. This continuing project consists of preparing and distributing material promoting the teaching of evolutionary biology, and advertising online resources that Akçay and his collaborators have been developing at http://evrimianlamak.org (the Turkish translation of UC Berkeley's Understanding Evolution website). Akçay also taught two lectures as a guest lecturer in Sergey Gavrilets' graduate level evolutionary theory class at UTK.

Akçay participated in the mathematical biology seminar course on spatial
optimization in fall 2009. Akçay also attended the weekly meetings of the Gavrilets
and Armsworth labs in UTK's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department.

NIMBioS is sponsored by the
National Science Foundation
through NSF Award #DBI-1300426, with additional support from
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.